Via the latest Windows 11 developer build, a Force Quit option may be coming to Windows apps.
When you close an application on Windows, you aren’t instantly killing the whole process. What you’re doing is asking the application to quit, which it can only do if the app is functioning normally. However, you can always open up the Task Manager and end a task directly, regardless of if the app is functioning correctly.
On MacOS, you have the option to do this directly via Mac’s Force Quit option, while the latest Windows 11 development build adds in a feature very similar to Force Quit on MacOS. The basic idea with this new feature is that, once you enable the feature in Settings, you can right-click on an application in your Taskbar and select an “End Task” option that will directly and immediately kill the application in question, forcing it to quit.
Tom’s Hardware first noted that the feature would be toggleable in Settings and that this wouldn’t be a default feature that would be accessible on new PCs without enabling it first. This is likely good news, too, because if this feature makes its way to Windows 11 PCs everywhere, the average user will likely want to stay away. Forcing an application to close with this feature could see you corrupt your own data or otherwise lead to issues if you aren’t careful.
As of now, though, this is just a feature in an in-development version of Windows that requires some tweaking and doing to even get access to in that particular version, so we wouldn’t hold your breath on this arriving through Windows Update in the very immediate future. In the meantime, on any Windows PC, you can simply open up the Task Manager and force apps to quit that way anytime.
